Customer Reviews

Windows Sockets Network Programming

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

If you are proficient in C and/or C++, and you would like to begin network programming, this book is for you! I found it so easy to learn from this book, that I wrote a simple chat server and client after about a week! I would highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to increase their programming power to access the world wide web with their programs.

This book is great! I am a VB developer who has been using this book to write some HTTP software, and this book has taught me all the theory I could ever want. This, combined with Microsoft's API documentation and a few good examples here and there, have allowed me to build the applications I needed and, more importantly, how to debug them. The organization of the book is not super intuitive; you really need to read the _whole_ book before trying to use anything out of it. In the first or second chapter, the author presents a "quick and dirty" description of how everything works. If you try to read only this chapter and start coding, you will slit your wrists. There's a lot of additional stuff (like WSAStartup, for example) that you won't cover until chapter four or so. However, once you've read the whole thing, it all makes perfect sense!

While this book has a lot of good information, it is out dated, sometimes wildly so. It continually hampers itself with discussions of 16-bit Windows which, while still in use in 1995/1996, was clearly on the way out, contrary to what the writers assert in the first chapter. Having said that, it is well written and the book deserves a second edition, dedicated to Winsock2 with nary a word on 16-bit windows.

The coverage of WinSock basics in this book is quite good, but the book has an Achilles heel - it's sorely out of date, concentrates on the 16 bit model way too much, and has NO THREADED EXAMPLES AT ALL (async winsock work is covered entirely with message-based calls, on the grounds that this approach is portable to Win16 - like I care about that anymore).

If you're interested in threaded Winsock work, then wait for a new edition or look elsewhere. If you're still writing for 16 bit Windows then (a) this book is fine for you, and (b) you have my condolences.

This is a Winsock 1.0 primer. There is a hastily-written ending chapter on 2.0, but it is far too brief.

In short, this book was a disappointment and is badly in need of a new edition.

This is an excellent book discussing not only Winsock but low level networking communication in general. Be advised though that this book was last published in 1996 so working in VisualC++ 6 will require a bit of tweaking. Also, this book is 95% Winsock 1.1. The last chapter covers Winsock 2 and is only 25 pages long.

I would have given this book a perfect rating had it been just a little more up to date. Don't get me wrong though, if you want to learn Winsock, this is the book to get. After reading through the whole book, I've used it for reference countless times.

Best Winsock book available IMHO.

If you want to know how MFC implement Windows Sockets and want to understand TCP/IP deeply, this book is for you. Reading this book you will be able to write professional internet applications without MFC. You will find tips and functions descriptions that are not in MSDN. It's really a MUST!

This is one of the best programming books I've read! In the six months since I've bought this book and read through it, I've managed to program my own winsock wrapper class & functions along with a Win32 client-server app, based mainly on code and principles from this book. The included examples do need a bit of tweaking to work on MS VC++ 4.2, 5.0, and 6.0; and the executables included are mostly 16-bit apps; but the code itself is extremely useful.

Although this book is focused on Windows and most of my (current) programming focuses on that, I usually end up referring to two UNIX books instead ("UNIX Network Programming" and "Advanced Programming for the UNIX Environment"). Those books have nearly identical syntax, but do a better job of explaining things. For Windows, there are some peculiarities (i.e., shortfalls) that you need to be aware of, so you really should own all three books, as I do. The amount of time that you save will be well worth it.

If you want to learn about WinSock API and the WinSock programming tactics this book is very good. However, I found few errors which are not very critical, in the examples. I never compiled the programs that comes with it but used the examples and theory learn about WinSock interface. When I started to read this book I have already had some experiance in BSD sockets and my intention as a Unix programmer was to learn the Windows implementation of Socket. For that purpose, this book was extreamly helpfull for me.